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In November/December, I built an alpha release of "Vanilla Perl 6" (combining Parrot and Rakudo).

I found it to be uninstallable (because it hard-coded all the filesystem paths at compile time which made it almost impossible to make an installer) and it leaked memory so fast that most simple test benchmarks I created consumed more than the 2gig process limit after running for a few minutes.

I concluded that the implementation was not sufficiently stable for me (as a person who doesn't know C) to do anything u

It'd be nice if "stable" releases never had bugs or regressions or memory leaks or misfeatures or incompatibilities, but that's not going to happen. If that's your criteria, you're going to find everything but TeX wildly unsatisfying.

Obviously you have to set your expectations for "stable" in terms of the project's roadmap, intended purpose, and intended audience, but with those caveats in mind, the single most important characteristic I see is "Does it do what the developers intend it to do so far?"

I like to use the the same concepts, definitions and terminology for software bugs, regressions, memory leaks, misfeatures and incompatibilities as the medical profession does for human bugs, regressions, leaks, misfeatures and incompatibilities. The medical profession has a lot of experience with issues that present shades of grey.

For (medically defined) chronic conditions, like memory leaks, you can use assessment criteria similar to those for mental illness.

I'd suggest that when most people use the word "stable", they refer to a release that is free from debilitating defects for the majority of users and use cases.

All I can find from you about these "debilitating defects" you found are two comments in IRC -- no bug reports, no messages to the mailing list, no description of steps to reproduce, no context as to what you were doing to trigger them. I started investigating Rakudo memory leaks in

Nobody likes quibbling about words. It's just that your definition of stable seems to differ from many people.

I did a fairly simple three line program with a loop in it, and it consumed all my system memory in about a minute.

It possible that it's just me jumping to conclusions.

Because it did it so fast and so blatantly, and we were still at pre-1.0 releases, I just assumed that it was a known problem, and moved on because I lacked the time or skills to investigate it further.